I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game for the first time back in January, and I loved the novel so much that I changed my online avatars to a teaser poster from the forthcoming movie. What I didn’t know, however, until someone on Twitter yelled at me for supporting the work of a homophobe, is that Orson Scott Card is a terrible person. I checked with Steven Lloyd Wilson to confirm, and he ended up writing an amazing piece on the fall of Orson Scott Card. It read, in part:

And thus Orson Scott Card’s gradual descent into a poisonous brand of politics has been nothing short of tragic to anyone who has read the masterpiece of Ender’s Game. His main focus has been on homosexuality, though he has ranged across the entire landscape of small-minded and hateful political issues over the last decade. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the vicious dreck Card has blathered onto the Internet over the last decade ended up being a performance art demonstration of the hateful populism that Demosthenes used to great effect in Ender’s Game.

Naturally, in light of Card’s homophobia, many have taken to boycotting the upcoming movie, though the studio and people behind the film are trying very hard to distance themselves from the author. Card, a Mormon and National Organization for Marriage board member, finally spoke to the issue in Entertainment Weekly.

Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984. With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state. Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

Oh, I SEE. He wants us to afford him — and other opponents of gay marriage — the tolerance that he and those didn’t afford us for supporting gay marriage. How so very hypocritical of the douchebag.

Here’s the thing, too: I know many people who are suggesting that we should separate the movie/book from the author, and in many cases, they’re absolutely right. But maybe they’re not as right when it comes to Ender’s Game because, as Steven noted in his piece, while the book didn’t espouse Card’s views on homosexuality, through his Peter character, he did in a way promote his anti-democratic values,

And in retrospect, it’s Peter who really announces what Card thinks about the way the world works. Peter’s the character who subverts the government, who takes over the world behind the scenes, with pseudonyms and back door deals to gather power like a pile of poker chips, before ruling the world for the rest of his life as a supposedly benevolent dictator. The contempt for democracy, the loathing for the very idea that the people should make their own decisions about their futures, is staggering in Ender’s Game once noticed.